Untranslatable Quotes

I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way, however, the camera also caught evidence against hope, and I eventually concluded that this, too, belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and thus useful. (Robert Adams)

One day she was playing on the swing when her father passed and called to her, "Come and give me a kiss, my little queen." Dérange-toi, Papa! Thérèse replied pertly - an untranslatable compound of "Come for it yourself" and "If you want it, you'll have to go the trouble of getting it", with perhaps even, "Don't be so lazy." Her father went by with a grave expression, but without a word, while Marie said: "You naughty little thing, how can you be so rude to your father?" I got off the swing at once; I had really learned my lesson, and the whole house echoed with my cries of contrition.

Thérèse of Lisieux

Music is arguably the most affecting of the arts; intelligible to all people yet untranslatable into any other idiom. To Schopenhauer it was a direct expression of the ‘world will'... and was good when he had guests over.

Derren Brown

Do not place the words of gurus, ministers, priests, scientists, psychologists, friends -- or my words --higher than the feelings of your own being. You can learn much from others, but the deepest knowledge must come from within yourself. Your own consciousness is embarked upon a reality that basically can be experienced by no other, that is unique and untranslatable, with its own meaning, following its own path of becoming.

Robert Butts

It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

Kenneth Rexroth

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

Anna Akhmatova

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Walt Whitman

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.

Walt Whitman

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

Jorge Luis Borges

Perfection is the exclusive attribute of God, and it is indescribable, untranslatable. I do believe that it is possible for human beings to become perfect. It is necessary for all of us to aspire after that perfection but when that blessed state is attained, it becomes indescribable, indefinable.

Mahatma Gandhi

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. (W. H. Auden)

But why do you force upon men, a million years of this wretched existence?” asked Lanarck. Laoome gave an untranslatable mental shrug. "I am just, and indeed benevolent,” he said. "These men worship me as a god. Upon a certain hillock, which they hold sacred, they bring their sick and wounded. There, if the whim takes me, I restore them to health. So far as their existence is concerned, they relish the span of their life as much as you do yours.” "Yet in creating these worlds, you are responsible for the happiness of the inhabitants. If you were truly benevolent, why should you permit disease and terror to exist?” Laoome again gave his mental shrug. "I might say that I have this universe of our own as a model. Perhaps there is another Laoome dreaming out the worlds we ourselves live on.

Jack Vance